New | Relatives, friends grieve for Taiwan plane victims as some blame authorities for crash
Some survivors give airline's chairman an earful; others unwilling to assign blame as 54 bodies prepared for transport
More than 100 grieving relatives and friends gathered at a funeral parlour on Penghu Island this afternoon to pay their respects to their loved ones on board TransAsia Airways flight 222 before the bodies of the victims are transported back to the main island of Taiwan.
During TransAsia chairman Vincent Lin’s visit to the crash site this morning, furious relatives confronted him, blaming the deaths on the authorities and the airline, saying the plane should never have been allowed to fly on Wednesday night in bad weather in the aftermath of Typhoon Matmo.
“My son was only 27 years old,” cried a woman who refused to give her name. “How could you do that to him? Give him back to me!”
A relative attending the ceremony this afternoon asked the authorities and the general public not to blame the pilot and the first officer because “They were lives lost, as well.”
A man surnamed Chen, who lost six family members in the crash, said: “We should wait until the investigation report comes out before we blame anyone. None of us speaking here were on the plane, so we don’t have a clear idea of what happened.”